


Stranger Than Fiction

by whopooh



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, F/M, MFMM Year of Tropes, Metafiction, complete fourth wall breakdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 20:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12540280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/pseuds/whopooh
Summary: The fanfic writer had wanted to write a sad fic for some time. Surely she could make some of her readers cry, she thought as she opened a blank document and started her new story.“Don’t,” a voice whispered in her ear.She spun around, shocked, as she knew that no one was home except her and her cat. Next to her on the sofa sat a beautiful, raven-haired lady, who was looking at her sadly. “Don’t kill him. You’re breaking my heart.”For the October trope challenge.





	Stranger Than Fiction

The fanfic writer was doing what she often did: taking a break from her normal, tedious life and opening up her computer. She had wanted to write a sad fic for some time. Surely she could make some of her readers cry, she thought as she opened a blank document and started her new story.

_When Phryne Fisher arrived at the car wreck, she was already too late. She saw the black police motor car, standing there on the side of the street, crumpled up in a way that made her heart beat harder with anguish. It couldn’t be... But in the remnants of the car, she could see a body she would recognise anywhere, the red lining of a brown coat partly obscured by the amount of blood …_

“Don’t,” a voice whispered in her ear. 

She spun around, shocked, as she knew that no one was home except her and her cat. Next to her on the sofa sat a beautiful, raven-haired lady, who was looking at her sadly. “Don’t kill him. You’re breaking my heart.” 

The lady eyed the writer’s computer, where her fingers had ceased their movement. 

“You have power in your hands. Use it for good,” Phryne Fisher said.

The writer – let’s call her Mia, since that’s as likely a name as any for her – inhaled deeply, not knowing what she would use the breath to say. She wasn’t accustomed to fictional characters showing up on her sofa. When she opened her mouth, what came out was:

“You smell just like I thought you would. Just like Jack always notices in the stories.”

Phryne looked wistfully at her. 

“Perhaps I always do. Perhaps I do for you because you’ve read so much about me. Who knows?”

Mia swallowed as she looked Phryne in her eyes, hesitating, feeling this was perhaps the wrong thing to ask, but unable to help herself: “Are you real?”

“What is real?” Phryne answered, as she rose from the couch and looked around the room. “Nice book collection,” she added as she took out a book to read on the cover. “I’ve never even heard of this author.”

“You can move my books,” Mia said. “You _are_ real!”

“Pish-posh!” Phryne answered, suddenly cheerful. “If only real things could move other things… how would you explain all the people you move with your writing?” She looked very pleased with her reasoning. “Huh?”

“That’s just the same _word_ , it’s not the same type of movement, Miss Fisher,” she said. Then she hid her mouth behind her hand and giggled. “I called you Miss Fisher! That’s alright, isn’t it?”

“You call me a lot of things,” Miss Fisher answered. “A raven-haired lady detective. Phrynekins. Indomitable – I know you don’t use that word for anyone in the whole world except me.” Phryne smiled. “You usually call me Phryne – like now, at the times when I’m being written _about_ , and not just talked to.” She pointed to the line above this one. “See?”

Mia felt a bit nauseous. “Ummm… Yes, I think so. I don’t know why I can see that, a line appearing in the air, but I can,” she said, her face paling. 

“Sorry, I’m upsetting you,” Phryne quickly said, squatting in front of Mia and taking her hand. “Most people aren’t used to being on so many narrative levels at the same time. For me, it’s become second nature. It’s as easy as wing-walking down at the RAAF.” 

She paused to consider this. “Do you even know the number of stories there are about me?” She sounded proud, her smile broad as she made a gesture to encompass the world. 

“Actually, I think I do,” Mia answered, secretly revelling in the feeling of Phryne Fisher’s hand in hers. “And I know several of the people who write them.”

“Of course,” Phryne said. ”I almost forgot why I came here.”

She let go of the writer’s hand and instead sat down next to her, looking closely at the screen. 

“How are you planning to continue that sentence?” she asked.

Mia looked down at the laptop in her knee. She had almost forgotten her own fic idea, so distracted was she from meeting her heroine. 

“Could I make a suggestion?” Phryne asked.

“Of course, Miss F… Phryne,” Mia answered.

"He’s not moving, but maybe he’s not dead... just unconscious. Jack has a very hard head."

Mia nodded. “I have noticed.”

“You could change that word here and… oh, wait. Maybe it’s better if I just show you?”

Before Mia had the chance to react, Phryne had taken her computer and put it in her own lap. She expediently (“hmm, is that really the right word for this,” Phryne thought as she noticed how her action was interpreted. “Never mind, that’s how it is when you have interpreters that are non-native. I’m sure she’ll check with her beta before she actually posts.”) rewrote the passage on the screen.

“How about this?” she beamed as she handed the laptop back to its owner.

_When Phryne Fisher arrived at the car wreck, she thought she was already too late. She saw the black police motor car, standing there on the side of the street, crumpled up in a way that made her heart beat harder with anguish. It couldn’t be... But in the remnants of the car, she could see a body she would recognise anywhere, the red lining of a brown coat partly obscured by the amount of blood that had spilled over it._

_“Jack,” she shouted. “Jack!”_

_She could hear mumbles from the body, and as she kneeled beside him, she touched his cheek to make him open his eyes._

_“Miss Fisher?” he whispered roughly. “What are you doing here?”_

_“Rescuing my gentleman in distress,” she said,_ looking pointedly over him into the void, giving the writer a very stern look not to contradict that by stopping her from rescuing him. _“Look at this!” she added and touched the stain on his coat with a finger, only to put it under her own nose. “This looks like blood, but it’s really ink! I think you’ll be fine Jack, although it looks like you’ve hit your head again. You’ll need some rest. Why don’t you come with me to Wardlow so we can have a lie-down?_

“Miss Fisher! Phryne!” 

It took Phryne a second to realise it wasn’t Jack’s voice, but young Mia’s. She had problems extracting herself from the narrative; it was always hard when you were in two places at the same time.

“Yes, Miss Mia?” she asked.

“This is lovely, but… I was aiming for angst. Real, heart-wrenching angst. I wanted to make the readers cry.”

Phryne wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

“Because it’s noble and cathartic, of course,” Mia answered. “You have surely read your Aristotle. I mean, I haven’t, not really, but I’ve read _about_ him.”

“I’m more of a hurt/comfort girl myself,” Phryne answered truthfully. “Can’t you layer in a really heart-wrenching bit about everything that goes through my mind as I approach the body, and all my regrets for not acting on my feelings earlier? And then, in the end when everything is fine, you’ll have to spend an equal amount of time on my orgasms as you did on my sorrow.”

“Miss Fisher!” the writer said, sternly. “You have read an awful lot of fanfic, haven’t you? That has already been done, multiple times.”

Phryne rolled her eyes, as only Phryne Fisher could. It wasn’t so much that she was reading the fanfictions, she was rather _living through_ them. She also eyed me, the next-level writer, firmly, to remind me not to make her roll her eyes too many times in one fic. Some days, the abundance of eye-rolls threatened to give her a headache.

“I know,” she said to Mia by her side. “I just happen to really like that kind of life-affirming sex when you get someone back you thought you had lost. I like it a lot. And it’s one of Jack’s specialities. Right up there with his leaning on things.” She got lost in an indulgent smile.

“Hmm,” Mia said, realising she had a perfect source for asking some questions about Phryne’s habits. “Since you’re here, will you tell me what you really think about all the sex we write for you? Do you mind that it’s all with the same man? Would you rather have it more spread out among all your lovers?”

Phryne leaned back a little, wondering how to best phrase what she was about to say.

“Mia, you know the way you call me indomitable, irrepressive, and headstrong? Well, either you say it yourself in the narrative commentary, or you let Jack say it.”

“Yes?”

“Do you really think I would allow it to go that far if I didn’t like it? I love to ravish Jack. He’s exceedingly ravishable.”

Mia blushed, thinking of all the positions she had tried to prove him ravishable in, even if she’d never used that word. Then a thought struck her.

“But… but… there are fics that make you a housewife with children! A selfish woman who doesn’t care for her friends and ruins a noble man! Even a detective that’s not particularly good at solving crimes!”

“I’ll tell you a secret, Mia.” Phryne leaned in a little, whispering with a conspiratory air. “I don’t mind either of those too much. I can be a doll to play with for different people’s wishes.”

“Really?” Mia asked with big eyes.

“Yes, to a certain extent I am ready for everything. And some people just use my name, not _me_ ; those stories I don’t actually need to live through.”

Mia’s eyes just kept on growing, bigger and bigger.

“Hey, next-level writer!” Phryne said and looked over her shoulder at me. “It’s whopooh, right? Don’t overdo it, will you?”

I nodded in agreement, and Mia’s eyes grew bigger, but not bigger than what was actually physically possible, only as big as it takes to show surprise.

“That’s better, doll,” Phryne said and turned back to Mia. “Where was I? Yes. You know me, I love to change my wardrobe often and I am open to trying all new things at least once. It’s just, sometimes I feel I’ve had too much of some things, while I’m still in character enough that I have to go through the moves, and I feel like… do I really have to live through this again? Perhaps I could… influence what I’m being put through.”

Mia blinked and pondered this.

“I know my writer friends sometimes say the characters won’t cooperate. That they – no, you – resist them. That they were aiming for a sad ending, because that’s what’s seen as more literary, but they just can’t do it.”

Phryne beamed at her. “See!”

“And that’s you?”

“Perhaps,” she said, a sly smile gracing her lips. “Well, sometimes. Other times, it might be their inner sense or conscience.”

“That one,” she said and pointed at me, “the woman who’s writing this scene. She can’t even _do_ sad endings – that’s not all on me. She usually ends her stories with a kiss.”

I nodded. I knew this was one of my weaknesses, but at least it seemed Phryne Fisher didn’t mind that too much.

“I don’t,” Phryne answered my thought. “Although I do think you could try to be a bit more imaginative. At least you make them long and lingering, and you don’t make our tongues battle with each other.” 

She winked, before she noticed Mia turning slightly white again.

“I’m sorry, doll,” she said to her. “Apologies for the quick shifts in narrative levels. Let me bring you some water.”

Mia accepted the glass gratefully, eyeing Phryne as she picked up Mia’s cat and stroked it. The cat immediately purred contentedly.

“About that story I helped you rewrite now. Don’t you think that we... I mean he, deserves a happy ending?"

“I do. I really do, and most of the time I write that. I just wanted to try something different. Sadder. To dig out my readers’ guts.”

“That’s just messy,” Phryne said. “I tell you what. If you write a second chapter of life-affirming sex, I could give you some ideas.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“You’d do that?”

“Of course! Might as well, as I’m going to have to live through it later. You do realise that I’m going to live through it not just once, but every time a reader reads it?”

“Really?”

“That’s the thing with literature, isn’t it? It might look like dead letters on a paper, but every time someone reads it, it comes to life again.”

Mia looked at Phryne in astonishment, then down at her laptop and her hands, and then at Phryne again. 

“Every time?” she said, swallowing hard. “Then we’d better make this good.”

Phryne leaned back in the corner of the sofa and smiled up at the ceiling.

“Right, let’s see…” There was a long pause. “Hmm. It’s actually not that easy to know what to ask for.” She sounded surprised at herself.

Mia wasn’t patient enough to wait through Phryne’s hesitation.

“Should he go down on you?”

“Should he what?”

“You know, use his mouth? On your –”. She waved her hand vaguely to explain something she realised she wasn’t used to saying aloud.

“Oh, is _that_ what you call it these days? ‘Going down’. It sounds like he’s on some exhausting trek. I don’t think my writers typically use that expression, even if they love to make him do it. They’re more into describing my scent. The moisture and wetness of my folds. The way I clench around him. That kind of thing.”

The two women looked at each other, feeling a little embarrassed. “It does sound more peculiar when you say it out loud. And about yourself,” Phryne said.

“I agree,” Mia said. “I’m sure I have written those exact words, and more than once.”

“Apologies,” I said, realising I was forcing them to say things aloud while I could just sit quietly and write them.

“Don’t worry,” Phryne said and flashed a quick smile my way. “I’m sure it’s a great benefit for us all to say these things aloud. Especially when it comes to women’s sexuality.” She tried the words on. “Wetness. Glistening cunt. She was hot and wet from desiring him. Et cetera.”

Mia nodded.

Phryne pondered the writer’s earlier question for a while. “Cunnilingus. Yes, I think Jack would be good at that.”

“We all agree,” Mia said, thinking of her writing friends. This was rather known territory for them.

Then she took the chance to ask a question that had lingered with her. “I’ve always wondered about your level of experience, Miss Fisher. I mean, you have a lot of lovers, but usually you only have them once or twice, so I would imagine they couldn’t be too exciting. In the books it even says you had only had penetrative sex until you met Lin!”

“There are all these versions of me, young writer,” Phryne said. “So, I’m all of the experiences, at once.”

“That’s not a real answer.”

Phryne cuddled the cat, who had laid down on her lap.

“Fine. Predominantly, I’m very experienced. But it does seem to tend to the slightly vanilla, I have noticed. Please feel free to expand on that.”

“Yes,” Mia said. There was a long silence and Phryne looked meaningfully at her from beneath the cat. “What, you mean _now_?”

“Of course. I have a cat on my person; I’m not going anywhere.”

The young woman’s cheeks turned spectacularly crimson.

“I’m not sure I can write about you having sex… while you’re actually sitting here.”

Phryne eyed her.

“Coward,” she said, but her smile was kind. Mia looked at her, flustered.

“Alright, I’ll give it a go,” she conceded. Phryne looked like the cat that ate all the cream and didn’t even get a stomachache afterwards. That simile rendered me a meaningful look over her shoulder, but she didn’t mention it.

“Excellent,” she said instead, directed to Mia. 

_They had made their way to Wardlow and it did indeed seem like Jack had a hard head, because he was well enough to both kiss Phryne for an indecent amount of time in front of her house and to climb the stairs without protest, even when the lady of the house distracted him by walking suggestively in front of him. When they finally made it into her boudoir, Phryne closed the door and stopped to just watch the man standing in front of her. She couldn’t believe he was finally there, in her bedroom, and all for her. She had never undressed a man as quickly before, knowing she would probably enjoy taking it slowly, but deciding that would have to wait for another time._

“Good start,” Phryne said. “I can feel the urgency, and that’s an important part of smut that is set so immediately after a danger. Why don’t you let me be a bit rough with him?” 

“How?”

“You know. Pulling his hair a little on the other side of painful. Perhaps kissing him so he can hardly breathe. Crushing myself against him.”

“Sure,” Mia said, adding that in. 

“Could you place him like that?” Phryne said, and when she pointed at the document at the screen, somehow she made Mia see the scene in front of them, as if she could see through the letters and into the story’s reality. “If I’m here,” Phryne continued, ”and then… No, too many hands. He already has two hands defined, hasn’t he, there’s no way he could do that.” 

She sounded disappointed. Mia patted her hand awkwardly, feeling sorry for not being able to help her with that, but this wasn’t that kind of AU.

Phryne tried a new position.

“Do you think he can bend that way?”

“I don't think _anyone_ can bend that way,” Mia answered.

“She’s right, you know,” Jack piped up from the story before them. “There’s no way I could bend like that.”

Mia squeaked out a noise of surprise and embarrassment.

“He can speak!” she said and turned to Phryne.

“Of course he can speak. You even write his lines sometimes.”

“Yes, but… he speaks with _us_. While he’s on my paper.”

“I don’t appreciate you talking above my head as if I’m not here,” Jack said from the page. 

“Sorry, darling,” Phryne said, obviously using the endearment to make him stop complaining and turn a little red instead. “I must admit I appreciate your lack of clothing, though.”

Jack looked down on himself, slightly embarrassed. “Oh. Right.” He eyed Mia. “Could you please write me some clothes?”

She obliged. When he seemed more relaxed, she decided she needed to ask them something she’d wondered for a long time.

“May I ask you both a question? 

Phryne smiled encouragingly.

“Do you prefer to give or receive oral? I know the fic writers differ there. And do you really find penetration the high point of sex and of feeling close to each other? It never works that way for me when I have boyfriends, and I’ve been wondering about that.”

Jack looked down, blushing. He was obviously not used to speaking about this kind of thing with women, especially ones he’d never met before.

“That is a good question, young friend,” Phryne said, thinking about how to phrase her answer. “It all depends on how the emotions are layered in. It’s the journey that is the goal, you know. Though I admit there are few things that are written more sensual than when he’s _going down_ , is there?”

It took Jack a few seconds to understand what the phrase meant, and then he blushed again, admitting that was probably his favourite too. After a while, he collected himself visibly and gazed out of his world on the screen’s paper. His almost imperceptible smile was directed at Phryne sitting on Mia’s sofa.

“I wouldn’t mind if you could make me resist her charms, just once in a while,” he said. “Seeing these stories, one would almost think I wasn't the world champion in resisting meddling raven-haired beauties.”

The gaze they shared over the border between their narrative realities was intense enough to make Mia feel hot under her collar, or it would have if she’d had a collar and not just a crappy t-shirt. 

“I have an idea!” Phryne said. She leaned in to whisper in Mia’s ear. Mia looked at her, bewildered.

“I'm not writing that.”

“It could be fun.”

“No. I’m not that proficient as a smut writer.”

“Fine.” Phryne rolled her eyes (and then she gave me a chastising look, “what have I said about those eyerolls, woman?”).

“But what if you would only _imply_ it, just as you’re about to fade-to-black? Then we could do it even if you don’t want to write it.”

Mia considered this for a while.

“Sure. That could work.”

“Excellent,” Phryne said and switched narrative level, so she was next to Jack. “Hello, Jack,” she said, almost purring as she captured his cheek with her hand. 

“Hello, Miss Fisher,” he said and smiled.

“Ready?” Mia asked.

“Ready.”

She quickly wrote away all their clothes, and watched as Jack bent down to give Phryne a deep, lingering kiss. 

Then she continued to write the most elaborate fade-to-black she had ever written.

**Author's Note:**

> This idea came rushing out when I had no intention at all to write another fic for October. Thank you to several slackers for chiming in with suggestions when I mentioned this idea - I tried to incorporate as many of your suggested lines of dialogue as possible. And thank you to Sarahtoo for generous reading and improvement!


End file.
